BRAINSTORMING WITH STORIES

Storytelling can be used for creative exercises. Don´t you think? Here are 3 options:

Twist Perspective: An exercise in creative writing

Tell a story - read it loud to the brainstorming participants or show a video.  This can be a corporate story, from the early days of your brand. Or a story from your website. Or a story from your customers. Or from your competitor. The job for your brainstorming team is now to rewrite what they´ve heard or seen and twist the perspective of the story. Ask yourself how the story may sound if another person would tell the same story. Change the perspective - and train your creative writing skills.

Change Style: An exercise to improve your imagination

Read a story or show a video to all participants of your brainstorming. Devide all participants into groups of 2 and ask each group to transform the story into another genre e.g. a crime novel, a science fiction movie or a western. Participants can change the plot but should keep the overall message of the story. Share all stories with the group and discuss the pros and cons of this new story. It definitely helps everyone to train their storytelling muscles and their imagination.

Get on Stage: Rewrite a speech

Many corporate presentations and speeches are done with a so called ‘corporate language’ – complex phrases, laking interesting images or storytelling. Bring one of this "typical" speeches to the brainstorming room - the script or the video and ask the team to transform this speech into an emotional, thrilling, exciting presentation. You can split the team in smaller groups and ask every group - at the end - to present the new speech to each other - and vote for the best transformation. 

A great exercise to become more sensible for the effect of small stories in presentations and a lot of fun.